Journal

This post is a rerun. I post occasional reruns as a kindness to myself and to unearth old posts for new readers. You can read about reruns, too.

Today’s rerun is First, a History. It’s the very first post on this blog—the blog that I publish a post on every day. I talked about my history, but really, it was about community. I said that I was writing—among other things—to discover a community; to find my people.

Tens of posts later and I’ve started to find it. I’ve had strangers reach out to talk about wonderful things they’re building. I’ve had friends reach out to reconnect and talk about their own writing practice. I’ve gained new friends who discovered me through my writing.

In the original post, I said that the way to discover a community of kind, creative people was to be kind and creative myself. I’ve tried to live by that through writing every day and putting it out there. I’ve started to make art every day, too, and it’s already helped me find new folks.

When I wrote that first post I had no idea what would happen, but I was convinced that I needed to make something every day and share it. I’m happy to report that instinct was on the money, and that it’s brought me joy regardless of any other outcome. Making just feels good.

If you’re looking for your own community, try putting your work out there, or whatever it is that you want to see more of in the world and connect with people over. Make something as often as you can and share it—you never know what might happen if you do.

If you can get past my goofy title, I’d like to describe something that I’m starting to believe in more than ever: you can write your destiny into existence. You can write what will be in order to, well, will it to be.

I’m obviously not talking about anything new here in the abstract, but in a concrete, practical, actual-lived-experience sense I feel as though I’ve stumbled upon something genuinely extraordinary.

I’m sure a simple Google search would unearth many books and blogs describing exactly what I’m talking about, but I can do that for almost anything—it doesn’t mean much without actually trying.

The most common example comes from morning pages, and sometimes it sneaks up on me. I might write about wanting to publish more for months in my journal, and suddenly (hello) here I am.

I wrote about starting my Point Reyes project for months, too, and suddenly found myself slogging along the sand under a hot California sun. I’d thought about similar projects for years beforehand.

It almost sounds romantic, but the truth is actually closer to being annoyed into action. There are only so many times that you can write about what you want before you have to do it (to shut yourself up).

Another example: writing a case study before actually doing the work. Writing for an imagined audience (without context on the problem or sympathy for the constraints) created instant clarity and urgency.

It felt so simple, and at the same time profound. Problems that I might have worked on in the abstract suddenly had to become concrete, plain-english language, and the solution started to emerge.

Again, almost poetic—but the reality is that I didn’t have the patience to stop my flow of writing, and so I had better figure this thing out fast. Write, get stuck, make. Repeat until problem solved.

Even this blog has made me start doing things that I had thought about for a long time before starting, and now seem to happen with a strange sort of ease—as though I’m writing them into existence.

I’ll end by saying that my favorite (related) thing about this blog is that I absolutely did not search the web before writing this, because I might not have written it if I did. Instead, I just started writing.

If you make art, you always have collaborators.

One of my favorite essays is from Leonard E. Read titled I, Pencil. It’s a short essay written from the first-person perspective of a pencil, and all of the people and processes involved in its creation.

Of course, if you use a pencil to make art, you’re inheriting all of those collaborators—plus (I suppose) the pencil itself. It’s our art, yes, but we owe a debt of gratitude to those collaborators I think.

The reason I like to think this way is that it sort of takes the pressure off. Much like having a genius, it suggests that the creation process has already begun—you’re just playing your part in it now.

People talk about staring at a blank page, fearing the first mark, but of course the page is part of the creation! Many others collaborated to contribute it. The page is not the beginning, but the middle.

If I believe that I’m simply moving a creation along in its journey, I can do so with the same care but without the same apprehension. It’s not even the end of the journey—the audience contributes that.

If you read the essay I hope that it imparts the same thing to you that it did to me: so many people have a hand in almost everything that we cherish, and we can consider all of them wonderful collaborators.

Today I asked Claude Code to read a good chunk of my morning pages and tell me 5 things about the person who wrote them. I’m posting the response here verbatim, without commentary or judgement.

1. You’re a multi-disciplinary creative who refuses to pick just one lane. You’re actively working on art (especially abstract painting with oil pastels), writing essays and blog posts, recording audio stories, design work, and photography—and you’re figuring out how to make them all work together.
2. You believe in showing up every day, even when the work is bad. You’ve built a streak of making “lunch makes” (daily art pieces) for 30 days straight, publishing daily blog posts, and writing morning pages religiously—not because everything you make is great, but because you know that’s how you get better.
3. You’re obsessed with places and want to document them deeply. You’re working on a field journal project capturing California’s most beautiful landscapes through field notes, photographs, ambient recordings, and sleep stories—using humble tools and focusing on really experiencing places rather than just visiting them.
4. You value making new things over repeating what already exists. You see life as a chance to mark each day as different, to prove you were alive and that the world changed because of your effort—whether that’s uttering words that might never have been said or bringing something into the world that wouldn’t exist without you.
5. You believe quality comes from care, not perfection. Inspired by Robert Pirsig’s writing on quality, you’re learning to express care through different facets of your life—whether that’s really listening to the places you visit, thinking deeply about structure and communication in your design work, or simply noticing the small things that make something feel genuine.

For my wife’s 30th birthday I designed a newspaper called The Best Times and got it printed by the wonderful Newspaper Club. In it, I wrote 30 of my most cherished memories from our relationship so far.

What started out as a gift for her turned out to be equally precious to me. It’s so easy to let memories drift away and become lost to time, but taking a moment to sit with them and document them is wonderful. I couldn’t wait for the next evening to write some more down.

Of course, great relationships accrue many more beautiful memories than 30, so the hardest job was choosing which 30 to include in the newspaper. A problem that I was very happy to have, to be clear.

I won’t share the actual memories here, so you’ll have to believe me when I say that I felt things just from thinking about them again now. You’ll have to trust me when I say you should write your own down.

Our memories aren’t guaranteed, and there’s no (easy) recovery process for the ones you lose. Sometimes, they’re all we have. Often, they’re the best things we have. I don’t want to forget any of them.

Writing that newspaper really started my love for little vignettes and for memoir, I think. For finding beauty in ordinary, everyday experiences. For cherishing the extraordinary experiences even more so.

If you’ve never done so before, I urge you to write down more of your memories. I urge you further to share them with the people you love. To sit with them together for a moment and simply hold space for them.

When I’m struggling to do something and need a nudge, I’ll try to create a ritual around the thing such that it feels special, and I’ll invest in small things as a physical symbol of that specialness.

A recent-ish example was my to-do list. For years I’ve struggled to keep it up to date, and would inevitably get overwhelmed before declaring task bankruptcy (and/or switching tools).

Something that started to help was writing things down on paper and keeping it in front of me, rather than hiding them away in digital tools. It was helping, but it wasn’t really sticking.

To make it special, I bought some Analog cards from Ugmonk. Worried that I’d just give up after a couple weeks, I only bought the cards, not the holder. If I stick with it, I thought, I’ll get the holder.

After a few weeks, I’d stuck with it longer than my notebook, but it didn’t quite feel special enough. The card eventually got buried under other items as the day passed, and I’d forget about it for a while.

I had just enough evidence to commit a little more, so I bought the holder. A few weeks later again, and these little cards, propped on their stand, feel like a completely invaluable part of my day.

It feels like a small indulgence to sit down every morning, slide a fresh card out of the holder, and fill it out. It feels special to prop it up, facing me, without anything else getting in the way.

It might seem a little silly that the exact form of paper could make such a difference, but it does. Making it special made me want to do it, and that’s all that really matters to me—the outcome.

I could, of course, just “try harder”, but I think that most of us spend enough time beating ourselves up. Sometimes, it’s nice to do the opposite. To make a small moment a special one, just because.

This post is a rerun. I post occasional reruns as a kindness to myself and to unearth old posts for new readers. You can read about reruns, too.

Today’s rerun is Your Story Matters. It’s a post about telling your story (or any of your stories), even if you don’t think you’ve got much of a story to tell. To start putting words to your experiences.

I wrote it because when I speak to people about telling their story, invariably someone will say “I’m not interesting enough, I just had a normal e.g. American childhood.” Of course, you’ll know that I didn’t have a normal American childhood (because I had a slightly unusual British childhood), so their story would be fascinating to me.

And that’s all there is too it, actually. The opposite is interesting for different reasons. Someone might very well want to be reminded of their own normal but cherished American childhood. Of course, there’s no such thing—they’ll want to hear it from someone where they grew up, who had community like theirs, who know the same in-jokes.

So if this post or the rerun help you to start telling more of your story to more people, I’ll be happy. If it causes you to sit with your memories for a while but keep them to yourself, that’s a wonderful outcome too.

For a daily blog, this post is the cheat post of all cheat posts. It’s a post about the idea of re-sharing a post. I was going to just… re-share a post, but I first wanted a post to point to each time I re-share.

It’s common (enough) in radio to share a rerun every so often. If you’re a listener of This American Life, you’ll know this. I used to feel a little cheated out of a new episode, until I realized that… I wasn’t.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve sometimes listened to the episode when it was first published, but on This American Life they don’t just share the rerun, no explanation. They’ll tell you it’s a rerun. They’ll add a little color. They might tell you when it was recorded and why, or why they’re rerunning this show specifically, at this specific point in time.

There are days—not that many of them, but they happen—where I have so many things to do that I really don’t feel like I can squeeze a daily blog post in. I have three options at that point: don’t publish a post at all (can’t), publish something crap just for the sake of it (don’t want to), or… what? I’m proposing that—just like in radio—I publish a rerun.

As with This American Life, I won’t just publish the same text—nor just link to it, no explanation. I’ll spend a couple minutes finding a post that I think is worth rerunning, and worth rerunning that day specifically. If I only have a couple minutes, I’ll spend it on curation, not on crap.

So from time to time, you’ll see a rerun from me. I’ll tell you it’s a rerun and I’ll add a little color. Some stretches might have more than others, and when there are more you can assume that I’m doing myself a kindness when it’s needed most. I hope you discover a post that you might have missed, or rediscover one at the right time.

I like work that moves me. I like work that shifts something in me such that I have some involuntary action (like laughing, or crying, or just feeling). I like work that’s surprising and touching and resonant.

When I come across work like that, I don’t try to interrogate it too much. I don’t try to dissect why it moves me, I just let it move me. I think that interrogating why it moves me might stop it from doing so.

I can’t even predict what will move me, really. I can’t seek it out in a way that I might want to. I just have to keep discovering things and occasionally it’ll hit me. A few examples of work that moved me:

1. The music of Ólafur Arnalds. I can sit alone listening to Ólafur’s music and just ride the wave of feelings that it causes within me. Sadness, elation, grief, contentment, wonder. All at the same time.
2. The paintings of Etel Adnan. Something in Etel’s work speaks to something deep within me. Makes me lose myself in landscapes that are barely described by the knife, but feel all-consuming.
3. Personal, spoken stories. The most recent by Ira Glass in act four of Ask a Grown-Up on This American Life. I don’t even know if I can relate to the story, but I felt the story as if it was mine.

None of this work was made for me, but it speaks to something ineffable at the center of us, I think. I suspect that I’m far from the only person moved by each of the works above—perhaps everyone would be.

Finding the work that moves you is such a wonderful, powerful thing. If I ever make work that moves others, I’ll consider it such a blessing and such an honor. One of the highest, maybe.

Something that writing and art-making has taught me is that I love living in moments and memories. I love staying awake to the things happening around me. To really look and see. To really listen and hear.

It’s the reason I love memoirs and vignettes. The reason that I love Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The reason I love slogging along the sand for hours to stare at the sea and capture the sound of it.

I like them because I like feeling things, and for reasons I’ll write about later my brain is wired to feel emotions much more suddenly and strongly than most other people. They take over me, briefly.

There’s something so wonderful about giving a brief—sometimes seemingly mundane—moment an internal standing ovation. To feel blessed to just exist in that moment and experience it. I love it.

I’m going to steer my art and writing more and more in this direction and see where it leads. I’ll sit with things a little longer. Look a bit more closely. Listen a little harder. Live for moments and memories.